Data protection is currently enforced by access control at the file level (for unstructured data files), or at the data table level (for a structured data base). Unless part of the contract, sensitive data usually is mixed with other data without any special protection.
Compliance auditing tools allow companies to verify compliance with, for example, data disclosure laws, company polices, and/or customer preferences. Such tools may track, for example, the user, recipient, purpose, and time of candidate queries, and the information disclosed by each query.